Mach Mich Stumm
by Hel-Lokisdotter
Summary: As the war draws to a close, Rudy, Liesel, Max, and Alex must begin to rebuild their shattered lives. AU; sequel to The Meaning Of Life. Rated T for... well, Holocaust. ON INDEFINITE HIATUS.


**Disclaimer: **The Book Thief and all its characters remain the property of Markus Zusak, who I am not, and never will be (sadly. Guy has serious talent).  
Lots of the information in the first few chapters, for anyone who's interested, also relies heavily on Viktor Frankl's Holocaust memoir, _Man's Search For Meaning, which I would highly recommend._

**A/N:** This is the sequel to The Meaning Of Life (.net/s/4944629/1/The_Meaning_Of_Life). You know, that sequel I've been promising for months and months and months and never got around to writing? It's been hard to start off, especially with the whole RL stress generally associated with doing far too many A-levels, but in fairness, I said in the Febuary-March period, and I wasn't far wrong, was I?  
Anyway. This is basically a draft copy, since I really need to reread both The Book Thief and Man's Search For Meaning before I'm at all sure about it, so it'll probably be edited when I get around to that. It's also kind of short, for much the same reasons. I haven't been doing much writing lately, and I'm a bit rusty.  
With all that in mind... enjoy! And please feel free to rip ten kinds of shit out of me if you think I'm doing it wrong.

**DASS ICH NICHT NACH DACHAU KOMM**

The skies were grey and bloated with the promise of rain, and underfoot, the ground was slick and muddy. Skeletal figures moved through the dim sunlight, like bundles of twigs held together by threads of fear. Even now, in full daylight, there was a darkness lying over KZ-Dachau. There always was, in those days.

Thin shapes, mere bones inside a stretched skin, carried the heavy metal beams from place to place, straining with the effort of holding up what weighed many times more than they did. The mud slipped underfoot, making the work harder.

**SOMETHING THAT SHOULD BE KNOWN  
I wasn't here. I knew none of this, not until later.**  
**This was a place for Death, not Life, and I was far away on that rain-heavy  
February day.**

When it came to it, sunset was a relief; the end of the shift, the end of the day. It's strange how the fear of darkness begins to fade when you're standing in the heart of it. The promised rain had come at last, and it thundered onto the tin roofs of the rough huts, breaking the dull silence inside.

The moonlight was sparse and dim, but the moon itself was bright, and inside the cabins, there was almost enough light to see by. On the lower bunk – blessedly vacated by its other occupant, an Austrian who had died quietly the night before – a man lay on his back, the thin bones of his arms showing through the skin. He was exhausted, physically and mentally, but that was the centrepoint of existence here, and there was no other way to be. That was life; exhaustion, hunger, pain. A monotony of suffering, and, ultimately, survival.

The other inmates were asleep. That was normal. Sleep, like food or drink or light, was a scarcity and a luxury. But the man on that bottom bunk, lying in the cold and staring into the semi-moonlit darkness, was awake.

His hair was like twigs, cropped short to his head still, and his swampy eyes were dull, sunk deep into the shadows of a face that was little more than a skull, but there was still a spark of stubborn life in them, undeniable. So very human.

His lips were moving, soundlessly and endlessly. The same words, over and over again, the same old jingle, running through his head time and again, time and again, since he had first read the faded charcoal letters scrawled on the bottom of the bunk above him; the bunk he was staring up at now. Just words, black smears on dark wood. Just two lines, twelve words, and a million wasted lives.

**THE WORDS**  
_**Lieber Herr Gott, mach mich stumm  
Daß ich nicht nach Dachau komm**_

**Dear Lord God, make me dumb  
That I may not to Dachau come**

The rhythm of it thrummed through his head, the warning words of people who hadn't needed to see Dachau from inside to know the horror of it. But he had been dumb. He had been dumb for years, locked away in a white basement with black words painted on the wall, and still he had come to Dachau. By a long road, true, but he was here.

Pulling a stub of charcoal out of his sleeve, he turned slowly onto his side, facing the wall, and squinted in the watery moonlight to see what he was doing. Daubing words onto the darkness, he thought of Liesel. Was she still alive? The Hubermanns, were they still surviving? Or had he planted seeds there that would grow into destruction?

Seeds.

Closing his eyes, still with the charcoal scratching along the rough wood, he thought. It seemed a century ago that he had thought of the seeds. Of white-painted book pages, _Mein Kampf_ still showing faintly through the house paint that covered them and crinkled the paper. Of the words he'd written there.

Of the word shaker.

The charcoal ground across the rough wood, leaving behind a thick black trail that was just distinguishable in the gloom. _Dass ich 'raus in Ganze komm_. That I may come out whole.

Underneath, he began to write _Max Vandenburg._ Considered it a moment. Scored through _Max Va_, all he had written, and closed his eyes. He wasn't Max Vandenburg here, and he didn't want to be. He could be Max again when he was free; for now, he was 7549210, and that was the number he scribbled under the little couplet, blindly and without really thinking. The charcoal broke on the two, and he scrawled the last couple of numbers with an inch or so of it left in his hand, grazing his fingertips on the wall as he did so, then let the stub of carbon slip out from between his fingers. It clattered onto the floor under his bunk, leaving a dark smear on his pale hand.

He wasn't a praying man, but he prayed now, eyes open in the gloom, staring at those words. They would fade quickly, and be gone before the spring came, but they might still outlast him, and he knew it. Knew it all too well. So he prayed, wordless and voiceless and restless, until exhaustion finally grasped him and he slipped into the sleep that wasn't death, but was close enough as to make no difference.

When morning came, he was the last up, sleeping until the guards came to wake the huts. Sleeping until then was dangerous; sleeping until you were woken gave you less time, and time was precious. He scraped blunt iron over his face in lieu of a razor; it was better than nothing, and it helped him to look healthier. Healthy was good; red cheeks, bright eyes – it was important to look as healthy as a starving man could. That was how they survived, by looking healthy enough to work.

But he was sleeping late, and it was almost light when he finally woke, to shouting voices and tramping feet. No time to shave. Only time to drag himself upright, pull his shoes on, and get outside. Then it came back to the same routine – working, eating, starving. Living and dying at once, in a kind of mindless stupor veined through with the sharp slyness of survival.

That was just how every day was. That was just how his life was, and how it had been for what felt like a lifetime.

No. For what had _been_ a lifetime. He wasn't Max Vandenburg, and it wasn't Max Vandenburg's life. He clung to that like a lifeline. But the time in KZ-Dachau _was_ a lifetime; the man 7549210 had been born the day he had entered the camp, and this was the life he knew.

7549210 dragged the heavy beams through mud and clay that clawed at the feet and dragged at the spirit. 7549210 stood in the greyish drizzle of a late winter's morning as the guards took stock of the prisoners. 7549210 ate the thin, flavourless soup and begged with the rest of them for a spoonful from the bottom, where the real food sank to. 7549210 ate, slept, worked, and breathed the concentration camp, and he knew the trick of it. He knew how to stay alive there.

7549210 kept the body in one piece. 7549210 kept himself out of the gas chambers, and scrounged food to keep himself from starving. 7549210 swallowed his pride, abandoned his thoughts, gave his entire being to survival.

And somewhere deep inside, the other him fought against extinction. Somewhere deep inside the shell that used to be a man, Max Vandenburg dreamed of the word shaker.


End file.
